Did you ever play the game “hide and seek” when you were a child? How successful were you at hiding from the person seeking you? I didn’t like playing the game very much. I was always one of the first to be discovered! There were some of the kids, however, who found some pretty successful places to hide.
Are you one of the people who are still hiding? Are you wondering why you aren’t being sought out as the go-to guy or gal in your company or consultancy, the subject-matter expert everyone wants to work with?
While you can throw a lot of marketing and social media effort at blasting yourself all over the place to “be found,” do you have the confidence it takes once you are discovered?
You know who you are.
You are the folks on LinkedIn who still haven’t posted a photo of yourself with your profile. You’ve convinced yourself you are protecting your privacy. Perhaps you feel that your gender, clothing, or ethnicity might be off-putting to professionals seeking the very expertise you offer to the global business community.
You are the folks on LinkedIn who have incomplete or abbreviated profiles. If you are an engineering, IT, or business professional in search of a new position, perhaps you perceive your Profile as a chronicle of your failure to work out within a siloed corporate infrastructure. You are still beating yourself up. You shortchange yourself by not taking the time to dissect how all of what you did for them impacted profit and loss. You were, and are, more successful than you allow yourself to give You credit for.
You are the folks on LinkedIn who list boiler plate verbiage for job descriptions from former positions you’ve held, hoping that an HR professional will read them and immediately figure out how and what you can do for their company.
You still are playing hide and seek. Professionally. You are pretty good at it, too.
The folks who need you on their teams can’t find you because your profile doesn’t speak to them and say: “Here I am!”
It is up to you, not them, to articulate who you are and what you can do in words they can understand and communicate to others within their organization. It is up to you to describe what you have done for others in the past in a translational manner showcasing your understanding of how money walks through your former organizations.
If you have decided to go into business for yourself, your self-perceived chronicle of failure is your pedigree, your right to claim yourself as a subject-matter expert because of the entirety of your corporate experience. No matter how unpleasant it may have been; no matter how long you have perceived it as a negative.
It’s time to declare:” I am!” instead of “I was”.
It’s time to stop hiding. Tell the business world: “Bring it!”
It involves more than simply selling yourself, first and foremost, on You. It involves searching for where you have been hiding yourself inside your head, and consciously, sensitively, and firmly Finding Yourself.
Now go seek. Yourself. You are worth it.
Babette Ten Haken provides technical people and other sellers a solid strategy for how to explain a product, its benefits, and its value in ways that buyers can easily understand and sellers can comfortably present. She gets people together who are often on opposite sides of the table, like engineers and sales people or entrepreneurs and investors. Her company, Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, works with entrepreneurs, start-ups & investors, as well as small businesses and manufacturers, focusing on revenue-generating and portfolio-building business development strategies. Her book, Do YOU Mean Business? was named 2012 Finalist, Top Sales & Marketing Awards.
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